For years, Nintendo has ruled the mobile gaming world, first with the Game Boy, then with the DS Lite. After an amazing run, though, the torch is being passed. Not to another gaming company, but to smart phone makers Google and Apple.

Over the next decade I believe smart phones will be where most gaming innovation will happen. The market for smart phone games is booming. A recent New York Times article reported that games make up more than half of the billion downloads from the Apple App Store. The App Store has about 15,000 games for the iPhone, and the Android Market has about 3,000 for Google Android devices.

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For years, video games were strangely absent from the social media tidal wave. Aside from casual games built into social networking websites, games didn’t support social media.

The recently released (Oct. 13) “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” for the PlayStation 3, hopes to change that with a built-in Twitter feature. The game uses Twitter in a fairly simple way, by sending updates on a player’s progress to his or her Twitter account.

Twitter is also at the heart of a social media update to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that went live today. It allows you to post tweets, read the tweets of those you follow, search and view trending topics. Along with a Twitter app, the Xbox 360 update also has a Facebook app to stay connected to friends through basic Facebook features.

These instances of Twitter in video games—one software and one hardware—still only scratch the surface of the potential to meld social media and gaming. The use of Twitter in “Uncharted 2” seems like a good way to market the game and to find other people who play the game, but beyond that it doesn’t do much. And the Twitter integration on the Xbox 360 isn’t very deep, as you can’t run the app while you are playing a game.

The real issue here isn’t how Twitter is integrated into games or hardware platforms, but how the gameplay can take advantage of social media’s best assets—connecting people and sharing information.

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On Sept. 9, the Beatles finally entered the world of digital music. This was an inevitable move, but what’s truly interesting is how they chose to do it. Well-known Beatles fan Steve Jobs has yet to secure the world-famous music catalog in a digital format for iTunes. So who did? MTV/Viacom and their video game studio Harmonix, which created “Rock Band: The Beatles” for video game consoles.

Money is said to be one of the sticking points in the negotiations to bring the Beatles’ catalog to iTunes. I have no doubt that money influenced the Beatles’ decision to do a video game, but I’d also bet that they wanted to do something different and cutting-edge. Read more…

If there is one thing that’s been part of video game culture since the beginning, it’s the debate among gamers over which platform is superior. Slinging insults at each other’s machines was easy with such a large arsenal of differences – graphical performance, exclusive titles and modding ability, to name a few. If you were a fourth grader at Pacific Drive Elementary in Fullerton, Calif., in 1993, you no doubt faced my position that the Sega Genesis was clearly the better platform because of how “cool” it was that you could turn blood on and off with the secret ABACABB code in “Mortal Kombat.” As fun as those debates were, I think the days of arguing about which platform is better will soon be over, as cross-platform gaming makes platforms less important.

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I sometimes have the troubling thought of “what’s the point?” Yes, I am referring to social media and/or social networking and not the question of whether to put on clothes each morning.

While questioning something that I study on a daily basis might be a pointless task, I would like to think it helps me to analyze it and understand it. This question is mainly ignited by other people who say “what’s the point of blogging?” Or, “what’s the point of Twitter? Aren’t people just stroking their egos with it by thinking that people actually care what you have to say?”

I have to agree with the naysayers sometimes. Sometimes, I really don’t get how some social media is anything more than the expectation that people actually care what I have to say. And other times… it makes complete and total sense to me. Are the times it makes sense when I think what I have to say is important? I don’t know.

Am I the only one who ever questions this? If you would like to point out the irony of this post in the comments, I encourage you to do so.

Today, the Criterion Collection launched a new feature, Online Cinematheque, that allows users to view films for $5 before they buy them.

The Criterion Collection is a home video distribution company that specializes in bringing seminal (and often difficult to obtain) films into personal collections. What makes Criterion releases unique and special is the quality of the release. Every film given the Criterion treatment turns out to be a beautiful product, from the packaging, art direction, menu design, film transfer, audio tracks to searching for lost and forgotten deleted scenes or interviews with the director. This quality product comes at a price, and that price is often double that of a standard edition DVD.

Because Criterion Collection films are often rare art house films, the ability to watch films online for $5 before deciding to lay down a decent amount of money on a movie you have never seen is a good idea. If you decide to buy the movie from the Criterion website, the $5 will be credited towards the cost of the DVD or Blu-ray.

It is refreshing to see the Criterion Collection exploring new distribution methods for important films and I hope other music and film companies follow their lead.

The latest election was most certainly decisive. The American public voiced their opinion and it was not for the Republican party. The Obama campaign absolutely destroyed McCain’s social media efforts in every single way. But I would hope that to be the case. Supposedly the Republican base is much older and out of reach from social media’s influence.

With that said… I am concerned for the future of the Republican party.

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